On Thu, 31 Aug 1995, Matt D. wrote:
> Gary wrote:
>> >Thank you for your comment on my post. Now I have to say that I cannot
> >talk about the American militias. <snip>
>> Given your cognizance of your own ignorance, you are surprisingly willing to
> advance very strong opinions which fly in the face of the small amount of
> evidence which has been placed in front of you.
Matt, I don't have weak opinions and I strongly suspect you don't
either. So I won't whinge about your strength and you won't about mine.
O.K.?
> This general, if rather cute (only the "lumpen" proles? is a worker not a
> worker when she has wrong ideas?) proposition is certainly unobjectionable:
Ah the Joys of cyber space. being called cute at 50 something..
Matt, the serious part of our disagreement is the difficultry of
assigning class. You think I do this on an idealist basis. To me that
is nonsense, but I am acting from the assumption that you simply need to
have more criteria than your "orthodxy" would allow. Now if that make me
"unorthodox" I could't give a flying fuck.
For me it's not a question of the difficulty of looking inside their heads.
(When someone is trying to take your knee caps out this is'nt such a
problem generally)It's what they do and are likely to do politically that matters. Now we seem to agree
on what the militias will probably do. We might be short of evidence,
but we would be pretty stupid and pretty dead if we always waited for
some one to do "research" before we came or jumped to a political conclusion.
Now I plead guilty to reluctance to admitting that workers can be
fascist. I know from my Irish experience they can. But I remain
convinced that organised Labor is the enemy for fascists and not the
source generally of recruits. So if a worker ends up say in the UFF
(Ulster Freedom fighters), for me he has joined the petty bourgeois grubs
and is no longer a part of the workers' movement. I simply will not care
if he spend 8 hours a day up to his elbows in shit. If he spends the
rest of his time in a fascist organisation then he has deserted the
workers and is no longer one. So theoretically class for me is not
simply a matter of the relationship to the means of production but also
to do with one's role in the relations of production.
Regards
Gary
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